[music]

Brian: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. Yes, it's Tea for Two. One of the things we're doing this week is checking in with various arts and entertainment sectors in our area to see how they're starting to come back or planning to come back when the time is right. Today, live music. You're hearing one artist who does plan to return to a live venue. We'll identify that person in a second. Because joining us now to talk about what else is being planned around town is John Schaefer, host of WNYC's New Sounds who is also your Morning Edition gig alert guy. Maybe he can tell us when some of those gigs won't be just via live stream, but live in person. Hey, Jonh?

John: Hi, Brian.

Brian: Who is that? Nice guitar playing.

John: Yes, that is Stéphane Grappelli, who is from France, but now lives here in New York, and who is really the guy who inherited the mantle of the so-called gypsy jazz guitar style that was famously made by Django Reinhardt back in the 1930s. That's Django Reinhardt's version of Tea for Two that Stéphane was just playing. I'll say, he recorded that live in our studio, our now vacant performance studio in Lower Manhattan.

Brian: April 2nd, that's the day when live in-person performances might be allowed to restart in New York. Do I have that right?

John: Yes, April 2nd, and so Stéphane will be performing in May in the small Brooklyn club known as Barbès in Park Slope. Yes, April 2nd is when events, arts, and entertainment venues, as they put it, are allowed to reopen.

Brian: Some of the bigger venues have less flexibility, as I understand it. The occupancy caps make it cost-prohibitive to reopen some of the bigger spaces. We talked about this on Tuesday when our topic was theater reopenings. Is it the same for music venues?

John: It is. As of April 2nd, you're allowed to reopen at 33% capacity up to a maximum of 100 people indoors, 200 people outdoors. Now, if you're requiring testing of your audience, you can go up to 150 people indoors and up to 500 people outdoors. This is all with social distancing and masks. As far as I can tell, so far, you're not going to see a whole lot of people going for the upper-level, the tested audience numbers, simply because as one or two club owners told me, it's too expensive to test everybody right now.

What the government has done, what the administration up in Albany has done is to set up this Excelsior pass, which is an app on your phone. You get a negative test or a vaccine. For 72 hours after a negative test or for six hours after a rapid test, this little app on your phone will get you into any venues that are requiring negative testing of their audience members.

Brian: That's so interesting. What a new world we're living in, John, with things like

that, right?

John: Yes.

Brian: Stéphane Grappelli is planning to appear at that small club that you mentioned, Barbès in Park Slope. I see you spoke with the owner and you brought a little bit of what he said on behalf of musicians as reopening begins. Here he is.

Speaker 3: If you're going to reopen venues, if you're going to reopen music places, musicians should be vaccinated. They should have the same rights as all essential workers, grocery workers, restaurant workers, and so forth. Especially musicians have been disproportionately sick. So many people died because older musicians were still paying gigs until mid-March. Other people playing weddings got sick. A lot of my friends playing Jewish weddings, the Hasidic community, it's like it's a big source of their income. They all got sick, every single one of them.

Brian: John, that's Olivier Conan.

John: Olivier Conan.

Brian: Owner of Barbès. Is there any word about when musicians who do not currently qualify on the basis of their profession will become eligible for vaccines?

John: No, and that's one of the reasons Olivier felt so strongly about making that statement. Is that there don't seem to be any kind of plans to move performing artists towards the front of the line when we invite them to start performing again. He was talking about setting up a Facebook page or an online petition to get that started. So far, I really have not heard anything along those lines.

Brian: He makes a good point. What do musicians do? Especially if the bigger spaces aren't going to open? They make their living in relatively small indoor spaces for the most part. Whether those are club settings or whether those are private functions like weddings and other things for which families hire musicians. City Winery is another venue planning to reopen I see. I think you brought a selection of music from an artist who frequents that stage. It's also very appropriate for this era. Here are a few seconds of this. Listeners, can you identify this artist?

[music]

Here I am in the 21st century,

I have to say it ain't as cool as I hoped it would be.

Brian: Steve Earle. If your guessed Steve Earle, you got it right. Those are interesting lyrics, John. I hadn't heard that song before. The 21st Century Blues because the 21st century isn't as cool as he was hoping it would turn out to be.

John: [chuckles] Steve is a public radio favorite. He is also a City Winery favorite. Now, they have not announced their artists and their schedule yet. They'll be doing that next week. I did speak to Michael Dorf who runs City Winery. As soon as the

announcement was made, he unfurloughed a number of workers to get started on booking people immediately. He intends to have a full slate of artists at City Winery.

Dorf also told me that for them, these limits, the 100 indoor, 200 outdoor, those limits work for a venue like City Winery. As you've mentioned, Brian, those numbers don't work for a lot of the bigger venues. Having said that, two of the biggest venues in New York have already announced that they're going to start doing live music performances. The Shed made that announcement last night and the Park Avenue Armory announced earlier this week.

The one caveat I have to tell everybody right away is getting tickets, it's going to be difficult. The Park Avenue Armory, all of their performances are already sold out of Afterwordness, which is a dance-theater piece from Bill T. Jones and Arnie Zane. I think you're going to see a lot of that at the beginning of the spring.

Brian: Well, hopefully, the bots don't buy up all the tickets and then sell them on StubHub. Here's a big question that I have. What about outdoors? New York has always had a pretty robust summer festival calendar. I don't have to tell you. Last summer even the outdoor things all got canceled. SummerStage in Central Park. The concerts in Prospect Park Tanglewood was closed. Kalmar in Westchester was closed. Now I see that the iconic outdoor space, Red Rocks in Colorado is going to start concerts again at about 25% capacity out of about 10,000 seats. That's pretty real. Are you hearing of plans for the summer around here at the outdoor spaces?

John: Yes, I think and that's where you're going to find a lot of your live music that you can actually access this summer, is outdoors. Lincoln Center has their restart stages. They are building 10 outdoor stages in various parts of the Lincoln Center campus. As part of that, The Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center which for years has done a very popular summer evening concert series, which was canceled last summer, they will be doing that series again this summer outdoors. I expect that you'll hear pieces like this Schumann piano quintet, which was recorded live by The Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center.

[music]

Brian: Very nice, John. We have this short little spot, you and me and you got some gypsy jazz in there. You got Steve Earle in there. You got The Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center playing Schumann.

John: Yes. That's going to be one of the big players on the music scene in Lincoln Center. I mean, they always are. It's important to note that there is a musical version of the city's open restaurants program and it's called Open Culture. People who run presenting organizations will be allowed to apply to present up to four outdoor events each month through this Open Culture program. You'll see I think a lot of smaller, almost pop-up style outdoor events this summer as well. One thing, Brian, that you will not see virtually anywhere this summer is an intermission. Even if you go to the opera up at Glimmerglass opera up in Cooperstown, New York, they will be doing outdoor 90-minute versions of operas like Mozart's Magic Flute or an evening of

Wagner music restricted to 90-minutes, no intermission

Brian: So that people don't mingle.

John: Exactly. Even Park Avenue Armory and The Shed, all of the programs that they're presenting will be without intermission. Everything is being adjusted to change to the new reality.

Brian: Do you happen to know about Tanglewood or Saratoga? I know you're a person like me who likes to spend some summertime North of Albany.

John: Yes.

Brian: Is the Saratoga Performing Arts Center, the Philadelphia Orchestra, and, of course, a lot of rock and pop and other acts play or Tanglewood. Are they going to have a schedule at all? Do you happen to know yet?

John: I have not heard anything from Tanglewood yet, SPAC, Saratoga Performing Arts Center has not made an announcement yet. I would be really surprised if both of those places don't have a pretty robust slate of summer outdoor performances ready by the end of this month.

Brian: Last thing. We all know now if we are music fans that the technical advances that allowed for live streaming of musicians in different places has been extraordinary during the pandemic. I've been to many live stream concerts during this time, including many that were ticketed. At least people can get paid a little bit and venues can get a little bit of compensation. It's usually just $10 to $20 a ticket. Do you see live streaming as being a thing that's here to stay, even if we're able to get back to live in the real music?

John: Yes. It's the bigger question about our lives in general, right? Do we just go back to the way we were in 2019? I don't think that's going to happen. I've also seen some pretty impressive online live-streamed performances and some of them have been geo-locked so that you only see them in a specific time zone. There were bands who have presented "touring concerts" where on one day they're in one city and the next day they're in another city because those events are geo-locked to those time zones. I think like with everything else that when the pandemic recedes, there will be some things that we take from our past years' experience and bring forward with us.

The technology has really developed immeasurably in the last 12 months. I'm sure that music presenters will find ways of making use of that.

Brian: We will leave it there for today, tomorrow, and this reopening in different ways. When the time is right series, we're going to talk about sporting events in our area for today. Thank you, John Schaefer, host of New Sounds and our guide always to great music. Thanks, John.

John: Thank you, Brian.

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